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Challenges await rock garden restoration

The rock garden in Washington Park. Photo by Matt Field
By Matt Field
Staff Writer
Published: Monday, December 6, 2010 5:12 PM CST
MICHIGAN CITY — Workers restoring a Great Depression-era rock garden in Washington Park will need to use similar materials and techniques to those in the 1930s.

Repairing the cracked sides of the garden’s ponds, installing a new roof on its water wheel house, putting in a new drainage system and more won’t be cheap. It could cost $500,000 by one estimate.

It won’t be easy, either.

“You’re going to have a lot of companies that don’t have the craftsmen with the skill to do the historic preservation,” said Shannon Eason, Parks and Recreation Department administrative director, “so that might push the price up.”

The park department will have to follow the stringent requirements of the federal grant it received. Eason told the parks board if sand is used in mortar around the garden’s benches, “it has to be researched down to the particle shape and size.”

The garden consists mainly of stone benches and walkways around ponds and narrow, short trenches. It’s near the Port Authority’s Washington Park Marina.

The firm Haas & Associates is doing the design and engineering work and has brought on a historic preservation consultant to help, Eason said.

The garden, which has three ponds, needs a drainage system. The department will have to persuade the Indiana Department of Natural Resources Division of Historical Preservation and Archeology that drainage should be added.

“If we restore it back to the way it was, when it was built, we’re going to have the same problems occur that we have now,” Eason told the park board. “It’s going to freeze, it’s going to crack. We’re going to do our best to convince them to let us use this money to make it (functional), but to give it a longer life.”

The garden was built by the Works Progress Administration, a government agency created under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which employed people during the Great Depression, according to a park department document.

The department received a $160,000 grant this year, and the first phase of the project may begin as early as next spring, Eason said.

She said the department will apply for more money in 2011.

It could take two or three funding cycles to complete the project, she said.

“If we have three rounds of bidding and separate construction contracts every year, that’s going to drive the price up again,” she told the park board. “This is turning it into an expensive project, but we’re still excited that we’ve got the money.”